The Division is recognized as a global centre of excellence on issues related to investment and enterprise for sustainable development. Built on several decades of successful experience, its staff provide international expertise in research and policy analysis, inter-governmental consensus-building, and technical assistance to over 150 countries. Its flagship product is the annual World Investment Report and its main global stakeholder event is the biannual World Investment Forum. The Division also maintains the interactive World Investment Network of over 9,000 members to disseminate and promote all its work on investment and enterprise.

News

On the second and final day, yesterday, of the conference on "Global Value Chains in the 21st Century: Policy Implications on Trade, Investment, Statistics and Developing Countries" co-organised by China's Ministry of Commerce, UNCTAD, WTO and OECD in Bejing, a panel discussion was held on "Global value chains (GVCs) and international investment."

The first official meeting of the EMPRETEC Latin America Forum was hosted by EMPRETEC Panama in Panama City last week, following a regional training workshop that brought together EMPRETEC directors and trainers from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Panama, Peru and Venezuela to share experiences and discuss new developments.

An UNCTAD report now made available on the website suggests that a coherent framework linking local pharmaceutical production to greater access from the onset within countries is urgently called for to harness the full potential of local production capacities. Improvement in access to medicines in the context of local production should not be incidental but should be an explicit goal, the report says.

“We should try to learn from the Investment Policy Framework for Sustainable Development”, said H.E. Sun Zhenyu, former Ambassador and Permanent Representative of China to the WTO at the launch of the Chinese edition of the UNCTAD World Investment Report 2012 in Xiamen, China over the weekend.

A high-level Conference on "Global Value Chains in the 21st Century" is being organized jointly by UNCTAD, the OECD and the WTO in partnership with China's Ministry of Commerce. The Conference has been scheduled to take place from 19 to 20 September in Beijing.